Month: October 2016

Happy Halloween to all those who read this blog and/or those who are stopping by for the first time.

Thought I’d share some more pictures of our Halloween adventures.

My lady and I went out Saturday night with a couple of friends. We went to a haunted corn maze and an evil stroll.

Basically, the corn maze was…well…a maze with jump scares.

The stroll was more of a performance. It reminded me of Scrooge because it was about a dead man being shown why he deserved punishment. As you can probably guess, he was a cruel and greedy man. At the end he was carried off by a pair of demons.

I’d share shots of our friends but I forgot to ask their permission so I’ll just share the pictures without them in the shots.

Here I have the eye patch but it was annoying to wear so I took it off. The strap kept moving down my face and I found it a tad uncomfortable only using one eye.

I love this picture.

This morning I dressed up for our company Halloween party. My lady put some makeup on me.

It was terribly frustrating for her. I kept pulling away from the eyeliner pencil and flinching uncontrollably. She also put some glittery black stuff on my lids.

I’ve been writing about this new prejudice + power = racism thing, and trying to point out how it allows groups of people to be racist without any social consequences, and now we are starting to see the very real repercussions this nonsense brings with it:

Student protesters at the University of California-Berkeley gathered in front of a bridge on campus and forcibly prevented white people from crossing it. Students of color were allowed to pass.

Sounds like the perfect way to protest bigotry…do more bigotry?

What madness.

In the video, the activists appeared to let several students of color pass unmolested, but white students were forced to find other routes. A few who tried to force their way through were violently rebuffed. Protesters shouted “Go around! Go around!” at a white man on a bicycle.

Another student was told, “This is bigger than you,” by a protester. “This is about whiteness.”

If you’re discriminating against people based on their skin color – no matter what skin color that might be – you’re being racist.

Just watching the video makes me so angry. Imagine telling someone they aren’t allowed to cross a bridge because they don’t have the correct color skin.

A feminist filmmaker has re-ignited the gender war by daring to make a controversial movie about the Men Right’s Movement.

As part of her research for The Red Pill, American film maker Cassie Jaye spent hundreds of hours with the internet’s most notorious Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs) over a two-and-a-half year period. For balance, she also interviewed some of their fiercest critics – such as Katherine Spillar, Executive Director of the Feminist Majority Foundation.

It sounds interesting to me. I’d certainly give it a watch, and aren’t documentaries supposed to be daring? Aren’t they supposed to challenge mainstream conclusions and open our minds to different perspectives?

Ms Jaye told the Herald Sun she was “shocked” that thousands of people would sign an online petition to ban her documentary from screening in Melbourne when they hadn’t even seen the film for themselves.

Attempts to censor ‘The Red Pill’ and bar moviegoers from viewing it come from the same ideological operations manual that has led to the harassment of students attending pro-men’s rights talks held in universities and colleges across the United States and Canada. These efforts to harass and silence people are a major highlight of the film.

It remains to be seen whether the Australian theater will cancel its screening of the highly contentious documentary. But regardless of the outcome, calls to suppress Cassie Jaye and her production, whether in the name of feminism or to oppose men’s rights activism as an ideologically incorrect movement only prove the point of her documentary. And the so-called “patriarchy” has nothing to do with this form of oppression.

The Australian premiere was cancelled on Wednesday, after an online petition calling on the cinema to abandon the “misogynistic propaganda film” eclipsed 2,000 signatures.

Susie Smith, who founded the petition on change.org, said the film gave a platform to views similar to those of Daryush “Roosh V” Valizadeh, a self-described neo-masculinist whose planned visit to Australia caused a stir with immigration in February.

Thankfully there are people who are willing to stand against censorship:

Williams, who is a spokesman for Men’s Rights Melbourne, pasted the email above a rival petition on change.org, set up to “stop extremists censoring what Australians are allowed to see”. At time of writing it had more than 5,000 signatures.

Now to be clear, I’ve never seen the film. I have no idea whether it’s bad or good. I don’t know whether it’s balanced or if I would agree with it in any way.

What I don’t like is people trying to censor it because it doesn’t align with their ideology.

“When I started this project, my perception of MRAs was definitely negative,” she tells me.“I thought they’d say shocking things and it would be a peek inside this mysterious, misogynistic community. All I knew about them was the cherry-picked, shocking comments used on feminist websites.

“But when I started to really listen to them, I started to empathise with a lot of their issues. Our cultural conditioning is that women have been oppressed and men are the oppressors. But I saw that wasn’t so.

“Within the feminist community, there is a level of dismissiveness and a lack of compassion. There is a feeling ‘they have been the oppressors, and now it’s our turn’. Some prefer to step on men in the process. Even when men were suffering, like falling behind at school, I heard a lot of talk about ‘toxic masculinity’ – that it was somehow the fault of the patriarchy, that men caused their own problems.

“But the MRAs weren’t loners or misogynists. Most of them are in loving relationships and have children, and that was shocking for me.”

She later goes on to say that her funding dried up because she was talking about an unpopular topic, but was saved by a kick-starter fund.

And before anyone starts saying it’s not censorship because no one is obligated to distribute the film, here is something written by Cassie just seven hours ago (from the time of this writing) in the comment section of The Guardian article:

Again, I don’t know how good this film is but it shouldn’t be censored. If people don’t like the film, they have the right to write a bad review, like The Village Voice did. Cassie should have the right to release her film and people can either choose to see it or not.

Besides, when has censorship ever worked? The people trying to have this film banned are only giving it publicity. People who barely knew about this film, or didn’t know about it at all, are now going to want to see it even more so they can find out what people don’t want them to see.

Doctor-assisted death will be restricted to mentally competent adults who have serious and incurable illness, disease or disability under new legislation tabled in Parliament today.

The long-awaited bill also sets out safeguards to protect vulnerable Canadians, but does not include some of the most contentious recommendations from a parliamentary committee, including extending the right to die to “mature minors” and the mentally ill, and allowing advance consent for patients with degenerative disorders.

Instead, the bill limits access to those “suffering intolerably” and whose death is “reasonably foreseeable.”

Personally, I don’t think the bill goes far enough but I agree with its implementation and the Supreme Court of Canada also agrees.

Of course, the religious have vehemently disagreed with the bill and I would never dream of trying to force them to have a doctor assist them in taking their own life, but some of them have no problem trying to force me to live through torturous, incurable pain.

Like the blogger I mentioned earlier:

Canada recently passed a bill legalizing what they term as “medical aid in dying”, whose proper acronym, fittingly, is “MAD”. Countless religious leaders of all persuasions spoke out against this so-called medical procedure as the bill worked its way through the Canadian Parliament and then the Senate, but the majority of Canadians supported the bill and now support the law. In other words, the majority of Canadians consider that getting someone to help you kill yourself is not only a darn good idea but a “right” that should be protected by law.

However, to be clear, I think that they have a right to do that. I think it’s unethical of them. I think they’re being unreasonably cruel by depriving the family of the service, but they’re also within their rights to be callous and stupid.

The majority of Canadians support the law because it makes sense and people don’t want to go days, weeks, months or even years dying in excruciating pain.

Let’s see what else this blogger has to say:

Only a few years ago, before the bill was tabled in the House of Parliament, people who indicated they were suicidal were still considered mentally ill in Canada and in urgent need of mental health intervention. If they persisted in voicing their suicidal intentions or even attempted suicide, they were usually taken into protective custody. Suicidal thoughts were considered – by law, by the medical community, and by the general public – an aberration and a clear sign of severe illness.

Please read what this bill means in my very first quote. People can’t just decide willy-nilly to take their own life. There are very real guidelines that must be followed.

No person of sound mind wants to kill him or herself. In my opinion, the desire to commit suicide has and remains an expression of an unhinged mind, regardless of the circumstances (i.e., terminal illness) or legal pronouncements.

Fuck me. I didn’t know you were a doctor or a psychiatrist.

We are talking about people who have an incurable disease, illness or disability. They will have to be judged as mentally competent adults by an actual professional, and they have to be suffering intolerably.

Denying them the right to say, ‘enough is enough’, is the cruel option, and we all know how religion often takes the cruelest, most despicable course of action.

However – and this is an argument that was never raised during the debates on MAD – killing yourself does not stop the pain. Death by your own hand is not a way out of a painful life. I know this to be an absolute fact, as do others who have approached death’s door and, for one reason or another, retreated. And yet, this absolute fact was never tabled as evidence against MAD during any of the debates or discussions prior to MAD becoming law. Instead, MAD was framed as a way out of suffering rather than a passageway to endless suffering, which is what it is.

You know this to be an absolute fact how?

It was never tabled as evidence because there is no evidence for such a thing. Your personal experience is anecdotal in nature. Your beliefs are not held by everyone and your religion does not rule our laws. If you want to go out bawling in absolute pain because you believe Jesus would want that, then you go ahead. Leave the rest of us out of your mythical house of pain.

We don’t want to suffer, we don’t want our loved ones to suffer, and MAD seems to offer a way to prevent suffering.

You are arguing that they (your loved ones etc) should be made to endure as much suffering as it takes before they draw their last breath.

Yet you don’t want them to suffer?

What is this double-speak?

Canada was once considered a Christian nation, but it is no more. For most Canadians, this dissociation with all things Christian is “progress”, whereas the truth is that turning away from God is the very opposite of progress.

We are not ruled by your particular religious ideology. Thankfully.

People who want to kill themselves need help to get to a state of mind where they no longer want to kill themselves, but in post-Christian Canada, they’re now given a doctor’s appointment and a two-week waiting period, and then they’re given a needle.

They were in their ‘right state of mind’ as judged by a medical professional before making the choice to end their life.

It is their life. Not yours. Not Jesus’. Not God(s).

Theirs.

Sadly, I believe that, like all other post-Christian nations in the world, Canada has reached the point of no return. It’s too late for collective repentance; all that can be salvaged is a few individuals who still hold to God’s laws and follow Jesus.

Given the alternative, you’d be wise to count yourself among those few.

Yes. We will have to keep on being prosperous, rich and happy as a society. Some of us will have the choice to end our lives before we have to inhumanely suffer days of physical torture, and we will be able to let our families and loved ones remember us as we were before the illness took hold. For some of us, we will be given the same ‘right’ that we grant our loved pets when we see that they are needlessly going through intolerable pain and have no quality of life.

Last night my lady and I decorated our house with Halloween gear, before heading out to a haunted trail event.

I had a lot of fun. We need more decorations, but it’s our first Halloween together so I figure we’ll gain more ‘stuff’ as the years go by. What we have now is good enough. The main thing was doing it together and having fun with it.

Afterwards, we went to the Mongolian Grill for some wraps. I realized that it wasn’t nearly as good as I remembered it. I think the biggest difference is that my wraps didn’t contain meat, since I’m now a vegetarian.

It just wasn’t the same – still good but it just felt like something was missing.

We then went and grabbed a hot chocolate and headed out to the Midnight Village. We weren’t allowed to take pictures of the actual event so the best we could do was take a picture before we headed inside.

The Midnight Village takes place in a pioneer village. You start out in a group and you have a ‘spirit guide’. You make your way around the village and stop at different outdoor settings where actors in costume tell you a creepy story.

It’s fun and it changes every year.

Our favorite was a sort of doll-like character with one dead eye. She recounts a story about how she was left behind and how her owner murdered her husband for being late to a dancing ball.